A Writer Recalls His Amnesia

David Stuart MacLean’s first book, “The Answer to the Riddle Is Me,” opens with a scene out of Robert Ludlum: The protagonist wakes from a blackout to find himself on a crowded train platform in India, with no idea who he is or what he’s doing in a foreign country.

The catch is that the protagonist is Mr. MacLean himself, and his book isn’t an international thriller but a “memoir of amnesia,” as his agreeably paradoxical subtitle puts it — the true story of how his memory was wiped clean and how that condition has subsequently affected his life. It is all the more thrilling for that.

In 2002, Mr. MacLean was a 28-year-old Fulbright scholar visiting India to research a novel. It wasn’t his first trip; he had gone a few years earlier and stayed for months. But this time around, his anti-malaria medication touched off a break with reality as sudden as it was severe.

He hallucinated angels and demons, and felt his thoughts “puddling in the carpet near the doorway and sloshing down the hall.” Delirious, he agreed with the police officer who surmised he must be a drug addict, and apologized profusely for misdeeds he had never committed. At the hospital, a nurse called him “the most entertaining psychotic that they’d ever had.”

As harrowing as this territory is, Mr. MacLean makes an affable, sure-footed guide. In his descriptions, you can recognize the good fiction writer he must have been even before amnesia forced him to view the world anew; if the writer’s task is to “make it new,” then losing your memory turns out to be an unexpected boon.

An avid drinker before his breakdown, he recoils the first time he tries Scotch again, thinking it smells “like Band-Aids.” He can’t remember his girlfriend of a year, but her voice is “faintly familiar, like the smell of the car heater the first time you turn it on in the fall.” He grasps at hope when his parents arrive to take him home: “I still didn’t have my memory, but I now had an outline of myself, like a tin form waiting for batter.”

Such flourishes can seem overly articulate — with unbalanced narrators as with child narrators, too much sophistication risks sounding inauthentic. But you give Mr. MacLean the benefit of the doubt, both because he is writing long after his faculties have returned and because that nurse was right: He is an exceedingly entertaining psychotic.

He proves to be a gifted science writer as well, although he dwells more on the brute mechanics of his amnesia than its implications. We get a lot of interesting, and scary, information about the anti-malaria drug Lariam, but not much about how memory works, or its role in self-identity.

Is personality innate or shaped by experience, or both? If by experience, whom do we become when our memories of that experience are stripped away? And how might amnesia itself alter one’s identity going forward? Mr. MacLean raises these questions mostly by inference, and then only as they relate to his specific case.

But the inference is enough. As he recovers at his childhood home in Ohio, then returns to India,he tries to fill in that outline of himself, and the effort becomes his central story. He pores through old photos, and reads the notes he jotted in books he doesn’t remember reading. “It appeared that I was always trying to decipher something,” he discovers, “even before I was insane.”

He rereads his emails leading up to the blackout, and like an Alzheimer’s patient or con man, he fakes familiarity with people on the street. “I still felt like I was chasing myself,” he says, “hoping that I could reconstruct enough of a working resemblance to that old self to slip back into. It was like building a plane while flying it.”

Some of what he learns is disconcerting. Old friends and professors assume he has staged his amnesia as a hoax; apparently, he was known for hiding his emotions behind elaborate pranks.

Meanwhile, he realizes he has no strong feelings for the girlfriend who shows up to dote on him. “It seemed like I was always pulling away from women who liked me,” he says, before vowing to change. But reinventing yourself turns out to be not so easy, even with a seemingly blank slate.

Gradually, he does regain his identity, although the amnesia haunts him like a hangover long afterward. He has suicidal thoughts and deals with his anxiety by smoking and drinking too much. “Continuing on in the world of the sane,” he writes, “is harder than you thought.”

Near the end of the book, Mr. MacLean acknowledges with amused resignation that his story “was most real to others when I talked about pop culture.” His experience was not like that of Geena Davis in “The Long Kiss Goodnight,” discovering a secret talent for cooking, or Guy Pearce in “Memento,” deciphering tattoos to solve the riddle of himself, he says, adding, “It’s not like Matt Damon in ‘The Bourne Identity’ waking up in an ocean, either.”

The riff is funny, but this late in the narrative it’s also unnecessary: Thanks to his raw, honest and beautiful memoir, readers will already have a clear idea what his experience was like. We can be grateful Mr. MacLean has remembered so much, and so well.